Cardiac rupture refers to a rupture of the left ventricle of the heart, generally following an acute myocardial infarction. If untreated, the condition usually is fatal immediately or within a few days depending on the extent of the rupture. It is believed that such rupture occurs in approximately 10% of patients with fatal acute myocardial infarction. Bates, RJ., Beutler, S., Resnekov, L., Anagostopoulos, CE. Cardiac Rupture--Challenge in Diagnosis and Management. Am. J. Cardiol. 1977; 40:429-37. It causes 25,000 deaths a year in the United States alone and is the second most common cause of the death after an acute myocardial infarction.
Cardiac rupture has been considered essentially unpredictable, although occasionally a symptom or sign has been reported at or just before the time of rupture. The rupture has also been generally considered untreatable, although recently methods have been described involving suture and sutureless repair with a patch after opening the pericardium. See, Subacute Cardiac Rupture: Repair with a Sutureless Technique, J. M. Padro, et al., Ann. Thorac. Surg. 1993; 55:20-4.
Stated another way, until the present invention, cardiac rupture could not be reliably anticipated, and there was no real treatment for it after it occurred other than by highly invasive procedures involving opening the pericardium. Patients who experienced cardiac rupture usually died, either immediately before any treatment could be administered or within several days due to the present treatment methods not yet being widely accepted. A few fortunate patients lived long enough to be treated and were under the care of physicians acquainted with the new treatment methods. Even those few, however, had to undergo a major surgical procedure that was both highly invasive and somewhat experimental.